when you want, where you want.
Cheese Tea Is Frothy, Salty, and Absolutely Everywhere
Photo: Courtesy of Uluh
I first started to notice the lines a couple of months ago, backpack-wearing teens and people in their early 20s snaking down sidewalks in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, waiting to go to Heytea, small shops that specialize in the frosty, foamy innovation known as cheese tea. A number of different purveyors offer the fruity layered iced teas — which are indeed topped with a pillow of salted, whipped cream cheese — but Heytea is likely the most famous, having first popularized the drink in China before expanding to elsewhere in Asia, Australia, and the U.K. The first New York Heytea opened just over a year ago; there are now 15 in the city, and wait times can stretch to an hour, though fans tell me it’s easy to order ahead of time with Heytea’s app.
I did order in person when I stopped into the store on Bleecker Street, where a TV screen in the back displayed manicured tea fields. I got a Cloud Crisp Grape, which was like a purple green-tea slushie with a layer of cheese foam on top. There was a Creamsicle-like appeal to the combination of dairy and medium-sweet fruit, but I didn’t quite know what to make of a drink that seemed like equal parts bubble tea, Slurpee, and Frappuccino.
“Boba is really just one of many things that are put into teas in Taiwan,” where cheese tea also originates, says Cathy Erway, a friend of mine and author of The Food of Taiwan. She says the U.S. is only now starting to catch up with the variety of toppings available overseas. (Erway’s favorite is loaded with “blubbery chunks of vanilla pudding.”) Esther Tseng, who first wrote about the Stateside arrival of cheese tea several years ago, calls all of the chewy, pulpy add-ins and aerated foams “texture studies” — and says it’s great to see a widening appreciation for the range of flavors.
Heytea, which also serves boba, calls its offerings “new Asian tea,” which accounts for the collection of colorful, juice-forward drinks and slushies in which tea is more a supporting character than a main ingredient. The approach has caught on at a number of other spots around the city, too. At Little Uluh, the brunch–and–bubble-tea sister spot to the Chinese restaurant Uluh in the East Village, there is cheese-foam-topped rose oolong tea, and matcha is layered with strawberry milk before being topped with an “egg” made of whipped cream and mango purée. At Partea, a neon night-market-themed space in Union Square, I ordered a whipped tiramisu oolong pudding tea and drank it while I played some of the arcade games. I was also reminded of the difficult-to-categorize “blue coconut” drink at the French Asian bakery Salswee: a mixture of pea-flower tea, coconut water, and salted whipped cream that tastes like cereal milk. And even though the place is primarily a coffee shop, the vegan cold foams at Dialogue — in flavors like carrot, osmanthus, and black sesame — are served over hojicha and matcha.
I always see students and delivery workers crowded into Debutea on Thompson Street, which opened in 2017 (and expanded to a full-service teahouse on Smith Street in Brooklyn). Co-founder Li Zhao says the cream for the cheese tea is hand-whipped for 40 minutes, and the menu emphasizes fresh ingredients, like the ube I watched an employee peel behind the counter. In addition to seasonal specials like genmaicha flavored with pomelo and a papaya frappé, Debutea has been expanding into drinks that don’t include tea at all for kids and other customers who may not want caffeine. One big seller is strawberry milk — lightly sweetened jam and whole milk served in a bottle and accompanied by straw that’s wide enough to slurp up all the fruity pulp.
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